App Center Retirement: How to handle UWP / MAUI Apps?

[Xynratron]

We use Visual Studio AppCenter for manual testing of our XAMARIN-App - it's much easier to deploy new packages for iOS, Android and UWP to our Testers - and distribution of Side-Loading Packages for UWP.

The information about the retirement mentions only Apple TestFlight and Google Play Console for distributiong to testers. How do we distribute UWP/MAUI-Apps to our Testers? Instead of "one Place" we now have to deal with 3 Websites / Workflows - if we use Microsoft Store for UWP.

Since Microsoft Store is often blocked in companies, which way should be used to distribute UWP/Mauis-Apps?

For Analytics & Diagnostics there are only some 3rd Party SAAS-Tools mentioned, but not Application Insights. Can Application Insigths be a replacement for App Center?

Since Xamarin ist also discontinued, we now have to move to .net MAUI (which is not feature complete compared to Xamarin) and have 12 months to move away from App Center. That is very unfortunate.

Can you please provide more information how to handle UWP/MAUI Apps in the future.

[Xynratron]

see also: #2626

[ArchieCoder]

From AppCenter via email to me yesterday:

Hello, thank you for contacting us.For distributing Microsoft Store applications, we recommend using Package Flights feature available in Partner Center.UWP applications published in Microsoft Store can log custom events through the Microsoft Store Services SDK.Please know that your feedback is important to us and we are committed to supporting our user base through this transition | Hello, thank you for contacting us.For distributing Microsoft Store applications, we recommend using Package Flights feature available in Partner Center.UWP applications published in Microsoft Store can log custom events through the Microsoft Store Services SDK.Please know that your feedback is important to us and we are committed to supporting our user base through this transition

[optimodzhu]

From AppCenter via email to me yesterday:

Hello, thank you for contacting us.For distributing Microsoft Store applications, we recommend using Package Flights feature available in Partner Center.UWP applications published in Microsoft Store can log custom events through the Microsoft Store Services SDK.Please know that your feedback is important to us and we are committed to supporting our user base through this transition | Hello, thank you for contacting us.For distributing Microsoft Store applications, we recommend using Package Flights feature available in Partner Center.UWP applications published in Microsoft Store can log custom events through the Microsoft Store Services SDK.Please know that your feedback is important to us and we are committed to supporting our user base through this transition

Appcenter can display the specific exception and stacktrace when uwp crashes. But Partner Center usually shows an unknown error, without any useful information. Is there any solution to get the crash analytics after AppCenter’s retirement?😭

[ArchieCoder]

@optimodzhu Years ago when I was a MVP, I poked Microsoft about the unknown issue at least 10 times. I was not able to convince them there was a bug in their pipeline. Good luck.